1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to provisioning subscribers, products, and services in a broadband network.
2. Background Art
Product and service offerings over broadband networks, including cable networks, have expanded in recent years. Originally intended as a way to provide television programming, the cable networks are now used for additional products and services. For example, many cable networks now offer high speed data service.
An existing approach to provisioning subscribers, products, and services in an existing broadband network architecture utilizes a directory system for storing information about subscribers. The directory system is restrictive as to what information is stored for a subscriber. The directory system stores three state-related attributes for each high speed data subscriber. The stored, state-related attributes for a particular subscriber, together, determine the state (for example, active or suspended) of the high speed data service for that subscriber. More specifically, the state-related attributes include a user status attribute, a provisioning context attribute, and a device status attribute. These attributes are hard coded in the directory system schema, and the provisioning system is coded to populate the attributes to account for various states during the service provisioning flows.
This existing approach to provisioning has been used successfully; however, there are opportunities for improvement. For example, all of the states are related to high speed data service because at one point in time, high speed data service was the only available service. As additional services are made available, high speed data service becomes just one of several available services, but the same states are still being used to determine the status of all services. Similarly, the service provisioning flows for a subscriber are single dimensional in that they are all tied to high speed data service. This existing approach to provisioning does not support provisioning multiple services in parallel.
Finally, in this existing approach to provisioning, there is no granular control of subscriber suspension, for example, for abuse. Because the high speed data states are used to determine the status of all services, flexibility is very limited.
In order to continue to introduce new products and services, it becomes necessary to provide new directory system schema, and provide new system code to populate the attributes in the directory system. For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for an improved method for provisioning subscribers, products, and services in a broadband network.